u/EllieJaine

By: E. Reed

My 1st memory is of picking tiger lilies. My 2nd is my doll in a spittoon, my mother bleeding, my sister crying, and me, trying to fight my father. Somewhere, approximating next, is a Super Nintendo being broken over my head and the pervasive black that followed. Then, I could finally hear, and the first sound I ever heard, was terrifying. Did you know, that if you've never heard crickets, they are in fact terrifying. I thought they were going to eat me, and no one cared to change that. Next, came the king, the tower, the dungeon, the loss of any innocence I had ever been blessed with....Never being a kid...because I was both my mother and sisters parent. Never having friends, because I was too weird and no one liked me. Then comes the hammered fingers and then the man my mom married and blamed me for being molested by, then the 15 people who decided that I was the evenings entertainment, using PCP laced pot to gain access, then so much more rape and drugs and screaming and yelling and beatings....

By: E. Reed

Arduous nascent concupiscence lingering

Spasmodic demented form tingling

Chimerical beast soliciting

Lustful phantasmic intellection cavorting within incubi

Carnal erudite gramarye

Verboten fruits, anathematized

Lascivious libertine

Nonchalantly frolicking

Admist the undying

By: E. Reed

I hate myself—I wish I didn’t,

the wish split skin and never finished.

I enter rooms already wrong,

a cracked note humming in the song.

Not death I want—just less of this,

the grinding weight of consciousness.

Unhand my name. Release the strain.

Let me ache—don’t end the flame.

I bless the bars. I learn their tune.

I sing the lock. I thank the wound.

Hello fades before it’s heard.

Goodbye outlives every word.

Want is guilt. Need cuts me thin.

Love burns warm, then folds back in.

Others glow. I dim and leak.

Luck slips out. The nights all speak.

Truth once said won’t go to sleep.

It stays awake. It stays with teeth.

Silence screams. The dark keeps score.

Sleep knows me—but won’t come through the door.

No savior bends. No ending heals.

I stand here open, what I feel.

I’m not whole.

I’m not free.

I’m still here—

and the room remembers me.